The Hindu : India and proliferation by Pakistan

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 29, 2004

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India and proliferation by Pakistan

By C. Raja Mohan

The international ramifications of Pakistan's proliferation will come back to haunt India. New Delhi will be mistaken in believing that it will continue to look good as Islamabad looks bad.

AS PAKISTAN struggles to cope with new pressures from the United States to end its expansive activity in spreading nuclear weapons around the world, India would be tempted to say, "we told you so." Such a complacent attitude in New Delhi will be counter-productive. For, the international ramifications of Pakistan's proliferation will come back to haunt India. The responses — immediate and long-term — from the international community to the new proliferation threat are likely to pose many difficulties for India. New Delhi will be mistaken in believing that it will continue to look good as Islamabad looks bad. It will need to act wisely and purposefully to prove that difference.

India has long sought to differentiate its own nuclear programme and policy from those of Pakistan. The current revelations about Pakistani nuclear proliferation activity do provide a basis to distinguish between India's reasonable record of preventing proliferation and that of Pakistan. But new non-proliferation rules — both national laws in the U.S. and the West as well as tighter international regulations — may not necessarily view India and Pakistan differently. And for those focussed on international law, both India and Pakistan continue to remain outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the centrepiece of the current global nuclear order. It will be easy for India to cry "foul" all over again. That would be of no real help.

There is no doubt Pakistan is facing severe international pressures on the nuclear front. In the wake of the American war against Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, there was some focus on the links between the Pakistani nuclear establishment and the Al-Qaeda network of terrorists. Then came the revelations of clandestine nuclear and missile trade between Pakistan and North Korea. More recent has been the official information from Iran and Libya on the large-scale transfers of sensitive nuclear technologies and material from Pakistan. Islamabad's goose was finally cooked by the relentless campaign in the U.S. media underlining how Pakistan had become the "Wal Mart of WMD proliferation."

As a result, the President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, has begun a massive damage limitation operation that is politically controversial. Denials of Pakistani complicity are no longer enough. Gen. Musharraf had to act against the scientists involved in proliferation activity. "We will punish them," he vowed in a recent interview. "We are going to be very harsh with them because they are enemies of the state." Few in the U.S. believe Gen. Musharraf's arguments that the Pakistani Army, which has been the underwriter and protector of the nuclear programme since its very inception, was not directly responsible for what has happened. But the U.S. is willing to allow that face-saving device to Gen. Musharraf — "the rogue scientists acting on their own" — so long as he delivers.

Ignoring for a moment whether Gen. Musharraf can root out the sources of proliferation in Pakistan, his decision to investigate the nuclear scientists involved is in itself a giant leap forward. All indications are that the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, is now under house arrest and in all likelihood might be found guilty of the charges and punished.

Gen. Musharraf has had no choice but to sacrifice Dr. Khan in order to preserve the contribution of the man in making Pakistan a nuclear weapon state. Dr. Khan is the closest to a national icon that Pakistan has had since Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of the state. Dr. Khan provided that all-powerful nuclear equaliser with India and made Pakistan the first Islamic country in the world to possess a nuclear weapon.

In India there is satisfaction that the world has finally begun to address the threat of nuclear proliferation in Pakistan. It certainly vindicates the Indian argument since the early 1980s that Pakistan has set a new model of nuclear proliferation. Without either an industrial or scientific base, Pakistan demonstrated that it is possible to acquire various industrial components and assemble them to produce nuclear material and weapons. But India was less clear about the external ramifications of the Pakistani nuclear programme.

Some of the early Indian assessments of the Pakistani nuclear programme did indeed point to the potential Islamic dimension. But the hardheaded conclusion was that while Pakistan had reasons to give its bomb an ideological character for political purposes, it would behave like a normal state and would not transfer its own nuclear assets to others. But to the world's surprise, Pakistan has now turned out to be the biggest proliferator — almost helping four other countries to become nuclear weapon powers in a short period of time.

Gen. Musharraf himself provides part of the explanation. "Before, there was a covert program for maybe 30 years, and there was a lot of autonomy given to the organisation and individuals running the program. There was a lot of chance for leakages. Now it's no longer covert. It's overt. We are a nuclear and a missile state. ... There is no question of leakages any more from our side." Gen. Musharraf is conceding that his predecessors might have been responsible for what happened before and that there will be no future proliferation activities. While the autonomy of the scientists, individual greed, pan-Islamism, and other factors are indeed part of the story, there is no denying that the Pakistani Army was the guardian angel of the nuclear assets and that conscious proliferation was part of a national policy.

It is this prospect, that both national actors and non-national ones could wantonly proliferate weapons of mass destruction (WMD) technologies that will lead to new sets of counter-measures across the world. It is the fear of new sanctions and laws from the U.S. Congress that has nudged Gen. Musharraf into acting fast. The European Union too has hinted that it will tighten its export control laws further. At the global level, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamad el-Baradei, has conceded that the non-proliferation system is "under a good deal of stress."

The latest developments in relation to Pakistan reinforce the view in Washington that the NPT system needs to be vastly strengthened with a full range of new laws. This would result in the creation of structures and regulations outside the treaty framework. This would also involve further curbs on high technology collaboration with states within and outside the NPT system. All these come in the midst of a substantive effort by India to create a different dispensation for itself in the non-proliferation system led by the U.S.

The statements on "next steps in strategic partnership" issued recently by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and President George Bush provide a framework in which India addresses the U.S. non-proliferation concerns and Washington deals with India's desire for easier access to high technologies. But implementing this so-called "glide path" agreement might get complicated in the new global debate on non-proliferation following revelations of Pakistan's role in the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Shaking off the Pakistan factor in India's nuclear diplomacy has been difficult. India can differentiate itself from Pakistan, only if it acts and is seen as acting with responsibility in dealing with the new threat. That would require substantive policy measures on many fronts.

First, New Delhi needs to go beyond rhetorical commitment to non-proliferation towards the creation of more effective controls over exports of sensitive materials and technologies and scientific personnel. This would involve the drafting of new laws as well as modernisation of its enforcement mechanisms in relation to non-proliferation.

Secondly, India must find ways to separate its civilian and military programmes in the nuclear field. So long as there are no clear firewalls between these dimensions of its sensitive programmes, India's ability to access advanced technologies will be constrained.

Thirdly, instead of passively watching the nuclear developments in Pakistan India must actively intervene in the global debate on strengthening the non-proliferation regime. It must be in the forefront of providing answers to the new challenge of dealing with the threat from the grey and black markets in relation to materials and technologies relating to weapons of mass destruction. As the nation immerses itself in the general elections, it might be sensible for the Government to appoint a task force to look into specific actions that would be required on these three fronts. When the dust settles after the elections, India should be ready to take some urgent decisions on issues relating to non-proliferation and safeguarding the national interest.

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